On the evening of 27 March 1806, running before favourable winds, the Juno approached the entrance to San Francisco Bay. Vancouver’s charts proved so accurate on every point that ‘we could have run into the harbour in the dark’,7 but Khvostov decided it would be prudent to heave to until daybreak. The Juno had arrived at the northernmost extremity of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
The Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI had first separated the globe into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres in 1493, with the dividing line running longitudinally through modern Brazil. All non-Christian lands to the west of this meridian were – in the eyes of the Spanish at least – the exclusive province of the Spanish Crown. The Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the Pacific in 1513 by crossing the Isthmus of Panama, and duly claimed both the ocean and all lands on its shores for Madrid. García Ordóñez de Montalvo, a contemporary Sevillian novelist, had written of a mythical ‘island called California, very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise’ ruled by a Queen Calafia and ‘populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons’.
The invented name of California stuck to the coastal lands to the north of Mexico, even though it was not a Spaniard but the English privateer Sir Francis Drake who was the first to explore them. Drake reached Point Loma, near modern San Diego, in 1579 and named the land New Albion. He also explored further up the coast, almost certainly as far as San Francisco Bay and possibly up to modern-day Vancouver Island. He was the first European by some 200 years to sail the north-western coast of America, but neither Drake nor his countrymen made any attempt to follow up the claim.
It was only in the mid-eighteenth century that Bering’s expeditions to the north Pacific and the Russian colonies in the area galvanized the Spanish authorities into making their theoretical claim to California a reality. In 1768 a team of Spanish colonists was dispatched to found a new port at San Blas in Mexico. Over the next twenty years a series of Spanish naval expeditions probed and mapped the Pacific coast as far as Kodiak. In 1788 the two empires finally made contact when Captain Gonzalo Lopez de Haro sailed into Three Hierarchs Bay and entertained Evstrat Delarov to wine and honey cakes on board his frigate the San Carlos. In 1789 a Spanish naval lieutenant’s violent challenge to British ships at Nootka Sound – discussed in detail in Chapter 4 – almost set off a world war. But by that time the Spanish had already established a chain of nineteen Catholic missions, protected by six presidios, or military garrisons, along the coast. The northernmost and newest outpost, consisting of a small presidio, a mission church and a farm, was established in March 1776. The friars named the settlement for their patron saint, San Francisco de Asís.
As the fog cleared on the morning of 28 March 1806,8 the Juno’s officers had their first view of the Golden Gate and, beyond, into San Francisco Bay. On the right-hand shore they could see a small fort. Above, on the bluffs where the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge stands today, was the tiny whitewashed presidio. Rezanov ‘deemed it useless to send in and ask permission to enter, since in the event of a refusal we should necessarily perish at sea’.9 Khvostov put the Juno straight into the bay with all sails set. ‘A great commotion was observed among the soldiers’ at the fort, who hailed the Juno through a speaking trumpet and ordered her to anchor. ‘We merely replied, “Si señor, si señor” and simulated an active effort to comply with their demand, but in the meantime we had passed the fort and were running up the Bay, and at a cannon-shot complied [by anchoring].’10 A party of horsemen galloped from the fort, and Rezanov ordered Lieutenant Davydov, in his full-dress naval uniform of blue frock coat and high boots, and Langsdorff ashore. Rezanov briefed them carefully on the lies he wanted them to tell. They were to ‘inform [the Spanish] that I was the Russian officer of whose coming I hoped they had been notified by their government’ and claim that the Juno was en route to Monterrey – the capital of Nueva California – but had been forced to stop for urgent repairs.
Twenty horsemen were waiting on the shore. One was a Franciscan monk with ‘several officers and a well-looking young man wearing very singular dress . . . a mantle of striped woollen cloth like the coverlet of a bed, his head coming through a hole in the middle’. This was the gala serape, the decorated poncho worn by Spanish soldiers. The officers wore undress uniforms of black and scarlet, with soft deerskin boots and ‘extravagantly large spurs’.11 The two parties had no common language but Latin, which happily both Langsdorff and Padre José Antonio Uria spoke well.
‘Habitationes nostras in regione ad septentrionem tenemus, appelata Russia est,’ Langsdorff explained – ‘Our abode is in a northern region called Russia.’ The Spanish replied, to the Russians’ surprise, that they were indeed expecting a Russian voyage of discovery to pass their way, but of two ships not one. The viceroy in Mexico had ordered all presidios to extend every hospitality to the visitors. Spanish diplomatic intelligence had reported to Madrid on the departure of the Neva and Nadezhda for the New World three years before, and the news was duly passed on to Mexico and thence to the most distant outposts of the empire. The Spanish had even diligently reported on the identity of the expedition’s leader. Rezanov was, much to his own consternation, indeed expected.
Half-starving, his breath stinking from scurvy (‘which spared no one, not even the officers’12), Rezanov was helped by his valet into his now baggy full-dress uniform. Sitting proudly in the Juno’s longboat in his green kamerheer’s livery, the keys of his chamberlain’s office, his diamond Order of St Anne and his gold Order of the Crown of Wurttemberg shining on his breast, a high bicorne hat perched on a head crawling with lice, Rezanov was rowed ashore. San Francisco’s comandante, Don José Dario Arguello, was absent in Monterrey leaving his eldest son Lieutenant Luis Arguello in command. After an exchange of bows and compliments, Arguello cordially invited Rezanov to dine. Rezanov, happy to be on dry land after a rough month at sea, chose to walk the one verst – roughly a kilometre – up the hill to the presidio.
Today the area around the old presidio is thickly wooded, but the magnificent trees were planted by the US Army in the 1890s. In April 1806 the bluffs would have been covered only in tall grass and brush, commanding an unbroken view of the Bay and its sea approaches. The presidio itself consisted of a white adobe barrack in a small settlement of neat houses around a swept parade ground. Langsdorff was delighted by the sight of the simple but regularly-built houses, which he thought resembled a German farmstead. ‘My eyes were so hungry for something peaceful and ordered and sunny and un-tragic.’
Vancouver, who visited the presidio in November 1792, thought it ‘resembles a pound for cattle’, with just two rooms and no glass in the windows. Langsdorff also considered ‘the habitation of the Commander is small and mean’, scantily furnished and with a beaten-earth floor covered in straw. But the comandante’s family was plainly close-knit and happy. ‘Friendship and harmony reigned in the whole behaviour of these worthy, kind-hearted people,’ wrote Langsdorff. The comandante’s wife, Dona María Ignacia Arguello, received the new arrivals ‘in the most polite and friendly manner’, and eleven of the Arguellos’ thirteen children were produced to bow and curtsey to their distinguished visitor.
Dona María de Concepción Marcela Arguello – known to her family and later to history as Conchita – was, at fifteen, the eldest daughter of the family. Her brother Luis described her as the ‘beauty of the two Californias’.* She was tall, shapely and had the clear pale skin of the pure Spanish ruling class. Her mother was the niece of the first comandante of San Francisco, and when Conchita was baptized on 26 February 1791 the comandante of the neighbouring presidio of San Diego stood godfather. The priest carefully recorded that Dona María de Concepción was the sixty-fifth white child born in the colony since its foundation. In this tiny community on the edge of the known world, Conchita Arguello was an aristocrat.
Langsdorff was immediately smitten. ‘She was lively and animated and had sparkling and love-inspiring eyes, exc
ellent and beautiful teeth, a smiling expression and beautiful features, a fine form and a thousand other charms including an artless and natural demeanour.’13 Rezanov had barely seen any European women since Kamchatka. He was immediately taken with Conchita and found himself ‘staring quite helplessly’.
The Arguellos treated their Russian guests to a simple dinner, impressing them with ‘as handsome a service of [silver] plate as could be seen; this costly American metal is indeed to be found in the most remote Spanish possessions’.* The Russian visitors found the food – mutton, salad, vegetables, pulses, fruit, milk and white bread – more overwhelming still. ‘Our palettes had for so long been strangers to these things.’14
In the course of this agreeable luncheon Rezanov found it necessary to tell a few more half-truths. He informed his hosts that he had ordered the Neva and Nadezhda back to Russia and that he ‘had been entrusted by the Emperor with command over all His American territories and had visited them the previous year . . . [now] I had finally decided to visit the governador of Nueva California to confer with him as the Chief of a neighbouring territory as to our mutual interests.’ Lest this whopping piece of self-aggrandizement get back to St Petersburg, Rezanov was careful to explain in his report to the emperor later that summer: ‘Be pleased, gracious Sire, not to consider that it was from empty pride, but merely to impress the Spaniards of the importance of our possessions in the North that I thus proclaimed myself comandante. The welfare, the interests of our country required it.’
While the officers lunched with the Arguellos, fresh food was sent aboard the Juno. After the privations of Russian America, the casual generosity of the presidio was extraordinary: four fat oxen, two sheep, onions, garlic, salad, cabbages, pulses, vegetables and even cherries. The effect this feast had on the starving crew was immediate: even as Rezanov’s party returned to the Juno that evening the fitter sailors were scrubbing out the stinking forecastle. For the first time since his departure from Kodiak the previous summer Rezanov could sleep without fear of shipwreck or murderous Tlingit.
A courier was sent to Monterrey with a polite letter from Rezanov to the governor-general of Alta California, requesting permission to come and pay his respects in person – one chief to another, as it were. The following morning, a glorious breezy spring day, horses were brought by Don Luis, who led Landsdorff, Rezanov, Khvostov and Davydov on a short expedition to the Misión Dolores de San Francisco itself, a mile away from the presidio over ‘naked country covered with low shrubs’.15 The fathers received the Russians enthusiastically, despite the visitors’ Orthodox religion. They were shown the mission’s collection of ‘ecclesiastical paraphernalia’ in the treasury – probably as unimpressive then as it is now – and prayers were offered. Langsdorff hit it off immediately with ‘our Cicerone, Father Uria, an intelligent and well-informed man’, with whom the doctor shared an interest in natural history. Paradoxically, the fathers were more aware of the outside world than the officers of the presidio and the local gentry because the priests served only ten years in the New World before returning to Spain. Over 300 ecclesiastics came and went from the viceroyalty every year. As Franciscans they were forbidden from owning property, which made them – crucially for the Russians – unusually open-handed with the food and other products of their vast ranches.
On returning to the presidio for hot chocolate and honey cakes, Rezanov launched his charm offensive with a flurry of gifts brought up from the Juno. ‘Fitting and valuable presents’ were distributed to everyone, male and female, ‘thus displaying every evidence of wealth and demonstrating our generosity’. Rezanov was acutely aware of the need to ‘hide from the Spaniards our distress and needfulness, of which the Boston vessels had told them to our disadvantage’.16 A single day ashore had demonstrated that California was a land of plenty beyond the wildest dreams of the Russians of Alaska, or indeed of almost any other part of Russia. Yet the ‘Spanish government is extremely suspicious,’ and had since the sixteenth century expressly forbidden its subjects in New Spain from any trade or barter with foreigners. American ships were not allowed to dock at all; the Russians were only allowed to do so because of the government order to extend them hospitality. But formally the ban on trade was absolute. This, Rezanov was determined to change.
Madrid’s philosophy of government remained essentially medieval. The New World was run like a vast feudal estate. Land was held either directly by the Crown, or by the Church or aristocracy, who were accountable respectively to the cardinal and the viceroy in Mexico City. The third estate of professionals, freeholders and merchants, the class which had overthrown monarchs in England, France and America, was deeply distrusted by the Spanish authorities. The peasantry were landless and, in the case of natives, often semi-enslaved. It has been South America’s tragedy that its greatest revolutionary, Simón Bolívar, shared the prejudices of his old masters. The nations he created from the ruins of Madrid’s empire later in the nineteenth century were run by tiny oligarchies, and continued to be so well into the twentieth century. The American continent’s other great liberating general, George Washington, presided over a very different society, in which property-owning merchants and small landowners insisted that they were collectively sovereign, and made their government and laws accordingly.
A reactionary government was not the only similarity between the Russian and Spanish empires. The men on the edges of both states were, as Rezanov quickly established as he chatted to the misioneros, just as ready to bend their monarch’s laws in the right circumstances. Rezanov was also evidently in agreement with Vancouver that the Spanish Empire was weak and ripe for the plucking. Rezanov carried the French translation of Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery with him to the New World: the presidios were ‘so wide from each other and so unprotected’ that ‘instead of strengthening the barrier to their valuable possessions in New Spain they have thrown irresistible temptations in the way of strangers to trespass over their boundary’,17 quoted Rezanov in a letter to the directors of the Company. Rezanov certainly considered himself one of the tempted.
A reply arrived by return courier from Monterrey. Rezanov was not to trouble himself with the journey; the governor was preparing to come to him instead. ‘Thereupon I recognized the suspicious nature of the Spanish government, which at every point prevents visitors from gaining a knowledge of the interior of the country and from observing the weakness of their military defences,’ grumbled Rezanov. In this case the Spaniards’ suspicions were extremely well founded. During his first days Rezanov spied out the colony’s armaments, garrison and defences, taking careful note of the ‘five brass guns of twelve pounds’ calibre’ which now stand in front of the presidio, covering the car park. They are fine late-sixteenth-century naval long-guns, decorated with coats of arms and cast in Spain; they were already antiques when Rezanov saw them in 1806 but nonetheless still deadly.
The Russians spent their days shooting partridge and duck with Don Luis and taking chocolate at the presidio with his charming sister Conchita, under the watchful eye of their mother. ‘Our past sufferings were delightfully requited, for our time passed very joyously,’18 Rezanov wrote to Rumiantsev. ‘Dona Concepción is the universally recognized beauty of Nueva California. Pardon me, gracious Sire, that in such a serious report I mingle something of the romantic but perhaps I must be very sincere.’
Langsdorff was touched by ‘the simple artless attachment that every part of this family seemed to feel for each other’.19 The Arguellos’ simple domesticity stood in sharp and obvious contrast to the brutality of Russian America. Don Luis and Father Uribe’s curiosity got the better of them, and they accepted Rezanov’s invitation to come aboard and inspect the goods on the Juno. The Spanish were particularly impressed by the ‘coarse and fine linen, the Russian ticking, iron shears, axes, saws, bottles, casks, glasses, plates and handkerchiefs’. Luis carried a shopping list from the women of the house for cotton muslin, printed cotton and pins. Rezanov gave Don Luis a fine English fowl
ing rifle, while Langsdorff loaded Father Uria with English cloth and a piece of ‘gold stuff’ for decorating his church.
New Archangel was more isolated from mainland Russia than San Francisco was from Mexico – but not by much. The prevailing southbound California current flows strongly against vessels coming north from San Blas, and the shipbuilding there was slow and shoddy, just as it was at Okhotsk. Between 1770 and 1821 an average of between two and three Spanish ships visited California every year; for thirteen of those years there were no recorded ships at all. Overland from Monterrey was a journey of at least thirty days by mule, and the road was frequently closed by hostile Indians. A voyage to Madrid, via Mexico, would take five months, almost as long as it took Russian colonists to cross Siberia to Moscow. California certainly did not lack for food, but the ban on trading with the Bostonians meant that the colony suffered from a chronic shortage of manufactures. Within days of Father Uribe’s visit to the Juno word of the trade goods available had spread through the colony. Priests were coming from missions as distant as San José, eager to place orders with the Russians if and when the governor would allow it. Don Pedro de la Cueva of the Misión de San José cheerfully informed the Russians that he already had dozens of Indians busy grinding corn into flour ready to exchange for good Boston broadcloth. ‘It was clear that this was far from the first time he had engaged in commerce.’20
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 29
